Losing our critical faculties? Operational research, modernism, post-post-modernism and post modernism

The difficulty of commenting on ‘After OR: An Agenda for Postmodernism and Poststructuralism in OR’ (Taket & White) is that any remarks need to be preceded by an immense amount of qualifying statements to clarify the grounds on which they are being made, and the particular interpretations of the terminology being used. This is not a criticism of the paper, but points to the fundamental challenges that it may be seen as raising for the forms of academic discourse within which OR, and many/most other disciplines have traditionally been discussed. Indeed, the reflexivity that is prompted by the paper is one of its important contributions.